Spam petition…

Ok.. the problem is not wanting people to ban together TO fight spam.. its more like HOW to fight spam that needs to be done. A petition wont do anything except make another list of names and email addresses for a harvester to get and turn around and sell to another spam company.

ok.. and presenting a list of people who want to fight spam still wont do any good unless you can help fond a way TO stop it.. Also.. Look into seeing that California governor’s Arnold S. has done.. He made it a law.. But better yet, look at the results it has produced. Like I said it’s not about people wanting it to stop, the war on spam is about how TO stop it. I’m willing to bet that about 90% of the people who sign petitions for that in fact actually do things to increase spam.

You might want to research where spam comes from, where the names are gotten from, what lists sell the names, what kind of harvesters get the email addresses from bots off the web that scrape websites.. How to protect email address from even getting on spam lists.. How to prevent spam.

Just my 2 cents.. When you understand how it works, it’s easier to educate people on how to prevent it which is better than putting a list together and just telling someone else to stop it.

You can tell someone else to stop it till you’re blue in the face.. But it won’t do any good when you realize that the things you do daily are what cause it to come back to your email address in the first place.

Every time you click on an email that says unsubscribe me (or even once), you have just validated the email is good. You might be unsubscribed from that list but it is sold to tons of other lists for $$ because that email is now valid.. And it gets you on multiple more mailing lists.

Everytime you “Enter your email address for this download” same thing.. a list of names won’t mean anything if the same people continue to do the same practices which bring them spam (even if they don’t realize what they are doing is contributing)

if you want to petition someone, learn to read the headers and start forwarding the spam to the owner of the domain by doing a WHOIS on the email headers.. Do a traceroute on the ip address it originated from a send the information to the ISP.

THIS is how it works to stop spam… believe me I do this kind of stuff for a living. If the list of petitioners just sign a list it wont do any good.. You have to goto the root of it if you seriously want it stopped.

Sorry about the long 2 cents.. But like I said.. There’s a lot more to it than just a list.. I can tell you that from an email admins point of view

Kahil:

but I have done quite a bit of research. for other forms of spam laws have been passed and organizations have been formed.

Really? And as a result spam has not slowed any. And most forms have increased.

Sending petitions to the “correct gov’t officials and organizations” is an exercise in futility. What did the Spam Act produce other than an email addy (spam@uce.gov) to forward your spam to?

The FTC has done zero with the hundreds of millions of reports they received.

Your peeing into the wind guy.

The thread started with the right intentions but ran out of steam without a reasonable solution. I was also going to sign the petition but the page is no longer there. I realised people may be a bit reluctant to sign a petition, I have one hosted by petition online. If you read the associated page

The Spam Petition

Then the actual petition you’ll see that by embarrassing the industry into action (11 years and its still a problem and look at what else has been achieved) then proposing a free, open source solution that establishes a decent spam filter for all it’s moving forward the tools people can use to fight spam. SpamAssassin is a great tool, however it isn’t always easy to access it and it would be better if the spam wasn’t on the Internet to start with.

While universal easy and free access to a powerful server side spam filter (that doesn’t use challenge response) is a useful step, the real way forward is to block spam at source and for that legislation is only one of a range of tools and personally I believe that technology is the main tool here. By shifting the emphasis from filtering at the recipient to trying to block spam at source hopefully it will start more people thinking along these lines. There are already some tools here but they are few and far between and only begin to scratch the surface.

Anyway, I hope you find the petition interesting and if you want to sign it then I thank you for your support.

Craig

Also, you can obfuscate your email address using javascript. I’ve seen people use ASCII characters and even CSS to do this, but a lot of crapbots can read ASCII nowadays, and a CSS image is not clickable. There are a very small number of crapbots that can decode javascript, but that is only the most basic of scripts. Automatic Labs has an email address encoder that creates a javascript link that is all but guaranteed not to be jacked (at least, not any time soon.)